After he walked me through most of the process via several Twitter DMs, I was finally able to set up the export on my Mac as well. Cause I’m lazy like hell I didn’t wanted to fire up the command in Terminal each time on my own. So I built a small flow with Automator which you may find useful als well.

Open Automator and start a new program. Chose “Execute AppleScript” and insert these lines of code:

That will start the export for the last 3 days. You can replace “3” with almost every number of days you like.
Then you can save it as a program and may place it in your dock. If you like to, you can automate this flow probably even more with timed iCal actions or something.

Google announced on friday, that they’ll start to force a clear decision from each German publisher, who is on Google News, if they want their content snippets to remain on the the service even after August 1st.

That’s a smart move from Google as a reaction to Germany’s new law called “Leistungsschutzrecht” or “LSR” which made it trough the Bundestag in march and will entry into force starting August 1st. Many publishers demanded fees from Google for showing short snippets of their content on Google News, because it would display their content for free.
This led to a heated discussion, because many of these publishers get up to 50% of their visitors from Google News. As almost all of them rely on advertising revenues and as many visitors as possible, their attitude looked like playing with fire.

Google now clearly showed, who is in charge in the discussion. It’ll be interesting to see, which publishers will opt-in until August 1st and which will stay true to his former announcements.
Especially the ones who argued the most against free content snippets on Google News will be in public focus.

As far as I know, only the big German news sites SPIEGEL Online, ZEIT ONLINE and sueddeutsche.de have stated, that they’ll opt-in to Google News.
Other publishers haven’t yet announced a clear decision in public.

Like many people, I was pretty bummed by the announcement of the drop of Google Reader. A lot of stuff has already been said and written about the assumed reasons why Google did that and how bad this is for so many users. But another point I’d like to discuss is the search, choice and transition to another service. This one bothers me most, because my rss feeds are a pretty important part of my daily workflow.

Even after reading Marco Arment arguing how this move would be great for the general improvement of rss, I wasn’t quite sure what to think. I wasn’t even sure if I “wanted” this change to happen.
Of course it was stupid and dusted thinking not to be open for something new that’s different from my current used to solution. So after a day or two I closed the chapter Google Reader for me and decided to just wait for alternatives to show up.

After the dust had settled, the most important question for many was: what’s next?
As a hardcore fan of the Reeder app for iOS and Mac, I didn’t felt that insecure because the responsible developer quickly announced the definite survive of Reeder beyond july 1st.
But what about the many users, who had relied on the google web service or used other apps which wouldn’t or maybe also couldn’t be as flexible as the guy behind Reeder? So a lot of people started to scratch their heads.

You didn’t had to wait that long to watch some new products appear on the screen claiming to be the one replacement for Google Reader. From good old Digg talking about having something big in development up to several smaller tools, that you wouldn’t remember even if they’ve somehow landed in your bookmarks.
But there was also a service named feedly, which made pretty cool promises about how they wanted to change and improve their service in the upcoming months to be a truly great alternative to Google Reader. The main difference was, that feedly was actually ready to use and the founders already invited the users to use it.

I discovered their apps more by accident just before christmas while Google Reader was still existing and played a little with them. Though I liked the more “flat” UI, some nice navigation elements like the stack pageturn and some other nice transitions, it somehow just didn’t felt right for me to replace Reeder with it and make it one of my most used daily apps.

Meanwhile, Silvio Rizzi had announced Feedbin as the first supported rss alternative for his Reeder App. So I assumed, it would be a good choice for me, too. I didn’t had a problem with paying roughly 2$ per month to use Feedbin and it kind of did did the job for me (though it synched very slow in Reeder and it was a pain in the ass to keep to rss services up-to-date at the same time). As it remained unclear, which other services would be supported, using feeds directly in the app was also presented as part of an update. But that wouldn’t fit for me because of the following lack of cross plattform sync.

Though I always had an eye on feedly (mainly to stay in the loop about new product features), I never considered it as a real alternative for me (you know, the Reeder fanboy thing).
At least until I read their latest announcement. As usual, they spoke about their pretty user centric roadmap (which is a great approach) and how they aim to fulfill their user’s needs throughout june. As a »one more thing« announcement, they presented results of their project »Normandy«. Throughout june lot of apps from 3rd party developers will be able to access the feedly API for free. Next to the Android gem Press I also discovered Reeder as one of the supported applications.
I couldn’t be more thrilled about that. Finally I’d be able to use the one app I trust on my daily dose of information and feeding it with an account from a company, I really admire for their awesome iterative work, their realised promises and a really reliable continous improvement of their own product at an incredible pace.

So while I’m waiting for the end of Google Reader, I’m looking forward to push the update button for Reeder to finally integrate my, yet to be tidied up, feedly account.